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World to mark 50 years of U.N. huma



Subject: World to mark 50 years of U.N. human rights code

World to mark 50 years of U.N. human rights code
07:00 a.m. Dec 06, 1998 Eastern

By Tom Heneghan

PARIS, Dec 6 (Reuters) - Global progress on fundamental rights comes under
scrutiny this week at an international gathering in Paris marking the 50th
anniversary of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

>From Nobel Peace Prize winners to grass-roots campaigners, supporters of
justice in public life will spend four days reviewing the past and
considering prospects for human rights in the 21st century.

``All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,''
announced the declaration adopted on December 10, 1948.

Enlightened philosophers, priests and politicians had shared this view for
ages, but it was not until this century brought two world wars and the
Holocaust that leaders came together to declare certain basic rights
inalienable.

Guided by such personalities as Mahatma Gandhi and Eleanor Roosevelt, the
United Nations approved the text stating that every human had the right to
life, liberty, justice and property in what Roosevelt called ``a Magna Carta
for mankind.''

The declaration, much of which has been translated into national laws around
the world, shuns discrimination, slavery, torture, arbitrary arrest or
exile.

That solemn declaration signed in Paris in 1948 did not immediately make
human rights a focal point of world politics. Dictatorships persisted, some
into the present decade, and full justice was sometimes elusive even in
democratic societies.

But, as participants at this week's ceremonies will emphasise, the patient
lobbying of rights groups such as Amnesty International, landmark agreements
such as the Helsinki Final Act and the recurrent outbreaks of ``people's
power''
 around the world have made human rights an accepted part of politics.

``There has been much improvement in the last 50 years, in many countries fo
the former Soviet bloc, Latin America and southern Africa as well as parts
of Asia,'' the U.S.-based group Human Rights Watch said last week.

``But any celebration of the 50th anniversary must be tempered by the
knowledge that serious problems persist, that many government still resist
applying the Universal Declaration to all their people,'' it added.

``Equality of rights for every individual and every people is the basis for
stability in any society,'' said John Hume, the Northern Irish Roman
Catholic rights campaigner who shared this year's Nobel Peace Prize with
Protestant leader David Trimble.

``We have learned that at our own expense,'' he said in a joint interview
with Trimble for the French weekly Journal du Dimanche. The two will receive
their prizes in Oslo on Thursday.

Among past Nobel Prize winners attending the Paris ceremonies will be
Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, Guatamala's Rigoberta Menchu, Tibetan
spiritual leader Dalai Lama and literature prize winner Wole Soyinka of
Nigeria.

Aung San Suu Kyi, the Myanmar democracy leader and 1991 Peace Prize winner,
will send a videotaped message from the semi-isolation the military
government has imposed on her at her home in Yangon.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and High Commissioner for Human Rights
Mary Robinson will also attend the ceremonies, which French President
Jacques Chirac will open on Monday with a colloquium on human rights in the
21st century.

Discussions will continue on Tuesday, followed by programmes on youth and
human rights and the fate of refugees on Wednesday.

On Thursday, the anniversary day itself, participants will gather in the
Chaillot Palace in Paris -- better known as the Trocadero museum across the
Seine River from the Eiffel Tower -- to commemorate the original signing of
the declaration there.